Photographer fishes for light under the sea

Tuesday

Jan 8, 2013 at 9:40 AM

On the morning of Oct. 29, Hurricane Sandy broke Avalon Pier in Kill Devil Hills. Two segments fell into the Atlantic Ocean.

By Justin LacyStarNews Correspondent

GOWhat: "Light Lure," an exhibition of nine of UNCW photography professor Courtney Johnson's underwater pinhole photographs taken at North Carolina piers, as well as images of the piers and the people who use them. When: The opening reception is 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17. The photographs hang through Feb. 22.Where: The Cultural Arts Gallery in the Cultural Arts Building, Randall Drive on the campus of UNCW Details: 962-3440 or www.UNCW.edu/Art

On the morning of Oct. 29, Hurricane Sandy broke Avalon Pier in Kill Devil Hills. Two segments fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Three days prior, Courtney Johnson carried a bag down the Avalon Pier, producing from it an odd contraption: a black tin can with a cord tied to the top, and approximately 56 ounces of lead fishing weights dangling from the bottom. She dropped the device into the ocean. Thirty minutes later, she pulled it back up. The pier fishermen were intrigued. "They were like, ‘what are you doing?'" Johnson said. "A lot of people were asking if I was crabbing or collecting fishing weights."Johnson was not collecting weights; she was collecting light. The contraption was one of Johnson's specially modified, underwater pinhole cameras made from a cookie tin, a pineapple juice can, string and fishing weights. In 2012, Johnson visited all 19 of North Carolina's functional fishing piers, not to catch fish, but to fish for light. The result is "Light Lure," an exhibition opening at the University of North Carolina Wilmington's Cultural Arts Gallery on Jan. 17, featuring Johnson's abstract underwater pinhole photographs. Johnson is the assistant professor of photography at UNCW and the CAB's gallery director. When she moved to Wilmington from California in August of 2011, she frequented fishing piers in the area. "I'm not a fishermen," Johnson said. "I'm a vegetarian, so I had no interest in becoming a fisherman, but I really liked being on piers. I was like, ‘What could I do to spend more time out on piers?' "Johnson was teaching pinhole photography at the time, so the technique was fresh in her mind. A pinhole camera is basically a lightproof container with a small hole in the side acting as the aperture. Light passes through the pinhole and projects an inverted image onto the film on the opposite side of the container. Exposure can range from seconds to hours.Walking up and down piers, Johnson had to figure out how to waterproof a pinhole camera, lower it from heights of up to 27 feet with the pinhole sealed off from light, open the aperture when the camera hits the water, and, upon emergence, close the aperture fast enough that the film does not over-expose in broad daylight. "I love that kind of technical problem solving, because I'm very nerdy," Johnson said with a laugh. Johnson brainstormed, designed and designed some more. Through UNCW, she applied for the Charles L. Cahill Grant, a grant that encourages artistic endeavors. She received funding in December of 2011, and began building and testing her underwater camera. She used a cookie tin as the main compartment, piercing its side with a tiny number 12 sewing needle. For her shutter, Johnson found a pineapple juice tin to be the perfect size: lose enough to fit on and off the cookie tin, and tight enough not to allow light in. She attached fishing weights to the bottom of the cookie tin, string to the top of each tin, covered everything with rustproof black paint and loaded the camera with film.In May, Johnson took to the piers, slowly lowering the camera into the ocean, careful not to separate the two tins. When the camera hits the water, the cookie tin sinks while the pineapple tin floats, thus opening the shutter and allowing light into the camera to write images on the film. In theory, if the camera sat still on the bottom facing a pier piling, we could see the piling in Johnson's photograph (a passing-by fish is insignificant during such a long exposure). But in the waves, despite approximately 56 ounces of weight, the camera doesn't stay still. It moves, a lot. So, after 30 minutes, the images end up fairly abstract. "The one thing that's definitely true in all of them is you get a gradient from light to dark: near the top of the water, and down at the bottom," Johnson said. "And my favorite thing is that there are all these weird spots and splotches and you imagine things that they could be, like, ‘Ooh, that could be a jellyfish,' or, ‘That could be the pier pilings.' You interpolate all these things that could be there, and that was kind of the point of this: taking a picture of something you're imagining, that doesn't exist, or hasn't ever been photographed. I know, in theory, how to take an accurate underwater photograph with the housing and lighting, but I wanted to take something that was not like the underwater photographs I've seen, or not like anything that existed." A small leak in the camera contributes to the mystery, adding water streaks to the film. The images are certainly otherworldly: abstract compositions that almost give vision to water itself, as if this is what the world looks like to an Atlantic Ocean water molecule. Each image is vastly different. Some are green and simple, others are vividly colored and complex. Johnson has no control over that variation, so while she's waiting for the 30-minute exposure time, photographing and chatting with fishermen and tourists, she has no idea what's taking place below."It was a really interesting experience being on the piers with all the fishermen, because they're really doing the same thing: They don't know what they're going to get. They're casting into the water and hoping something passes. We're just standing there, waiting for something great to happen." Johnson got a ripe introduction to the coast of North Carolina, visiting so many beaches and learning about the state's piers. "Everybody has a story about a pier, a memory of going to a pier," Johnson said. "They know of the pier almost being demolished, or almost being sold, and it's a nice communal thing that we have in this state."There's also the sheer daftness of piers: manmade structures built jutting out into the most relentless elements of nature. Over the years, North Carolina's pier count has dwindled from 36 to 19. "And it just keeps going down and down and down," Johnson said. "They'll break in a hurricane and then because of the economy, they won't be rebuilt. Because of the coastal real estate being so expensive, and people wanting to buy it for hotels or houses, there are just fewer and fewer piers." On Oct. 26, as Hurricane Sandy made her way to the Outer Banks, Johnson stood in the pouring rain on Nag's Head Fishing Pier, her 19th pier, and lowered her camera into the choppy ocean. It was her "wildest image."

Features: 343-2343

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